The honest answer to “how much should I spend on marketing?” is that the number matters far less than the order you spend it in. Most clinics we speak to are not underspending. They are spending in the wrong sequence, and it makes a healthy budget behave like a small one.
Written by Vanessa Kay, founder of The Kay Media. Seven years running digital marketing for Fortune 500 brands, then 25+ injectors and clinics scaled across Toronto and Canada, with a best client month north of $200k.
The numbers below come from running budgets for injector-led practices, not from an industry survey. Where a figure depends on your situation, this says so instead of inventing a benchmark.
Ask ten agencies what a med spa should spend and you will get ten percentages. Somewhere between 5% and 15% of revenue is the usual answer, and it is not wrong exactly, it is just useless on its own. A clinic doing $40k a month with no offer and no follow-up will waste 10% just as efficiently as it would waste 5%.
So this is written the other way round. Not “what percentage”, but “what has to be true before each dollar does anything”.
The three questions that decide your number
Before any figure means anything, you need three of your own numbers. Most clinics we start with do not have them written down anywhere, which is itself the finding.
1. What is a new client actually worth to you?
Not the price of one appointment. What a client spends with you over the first twelve months, on average, across everything they book. If you have never worked this out, pull twelve months of bookings and divide. The number is almost always higher than clinic owners guess, and it changes what you can afford to pay to acquire someone.
2. What share of consults do you close?
If you close 8 out of 10 consults, traffic is your constraint and spending on ads makes sense. If you close 3 out of 10, more traffic just means more people deciding not to book, and the budget belongs in the consult and the offer first. This single ratio decides where the money should go, and almost nobody measures it.
3. How full is the calendar right now?
A clinic at 60% capacity and a clinic turning people away need opposite plans. Spending to fill a calendar that is already full is how practices end up with burnt-out staff and no margin improvement.
Turning those numbers into a monthly figure
Once you have the three answers, the budget for paid ads stops being a guess. Work it backwards from the clients you need:
- New clients you want each month. Start from the empty slots in your calendar, not from a growth target pulled out of the air.
- Divide by your close rate to get the booked consults you need. If you close half your consults, you need twice as many consults as clients.
- Multiply by your cost per booked consult. If you have no history yet, a healthy range for med spas usually sits somewhere between $80 and $300 per booked consultation, depending on the treatment.
Two checks keep that figure honest. First, Meta needs enough spend to learn who books: below roughly $1,500 a month, a campaign rarely gathers enough data to optimise, so a smaller budget is better spent on the free work further down this page. Second, if the answer is more than a new client is worth to you, the fix is the offer or the close rate, not a bigger budget.
If you still want a percentage as a sanity check, the usual 5% to 15% of revenue is a reasonable frame. Sit near the low end when your calendar is mostly full and repeat clients carry the revenue. Sit near the top when you are deliberately adding new clients, launching a treatment or opening a second room. Our budget calculator runs the same sum for you.
The order that makes a budget work
We run these in a deliberate sequence for every clinic, and the sequence matters more than the totals. It is the same order laid out in our med spa marketing guide, applied to money rather than tactics.
| Order | Where it goes | Why it comes here |
|---|---|---|
| First | The offer | Costs almost nothing but thinking time. What you sell, what it costs a client to say yes, and why they would choose it over doing nothing. Nearly every clinic that arrives describing a traffic problem has an offer problem. |
| Second | Paid ads | A good offer is the only thing that makes paid traffic profitable rather than expensive. Start small enough that a bad week is survivable, and judge it on booked consults, not clicks. |
| Third | Content and search | Slower, and it compounds. This is what stops you renting every client from an ad platform forever. |
| Fourth | Everything else | Social management, brand work, printed material. Real, but they rarely move bookings on their own, and they are where most wasted budget hides. |
What the money actually pays for
“Marketing budget” usually hides four different costs. When you compare quotes or plan your own spend, separate them, because they behave very differently:
- Ad spend. The money that goes to Meta or Google. It is the only part that buys reach directly, and it is the part to scale up or down with your calendar.
- Management. Whoever builds and runs the campaigns, the offer and the follow-up, whether that is you, a staff member or an agency. This is a fixed cost, so a small ad budget with a large management fee is upside down.
- Creative. Photos and short videos of you, your room and your process. A few hours of filming a month usually covers it, and raw phone video often outperforms a studio shoot.
- Tools. Booking software, a CRM, email and text. Mostly small monthly fees, and they are what turns enquiries into booked consults, so they are rarely the place to save.
A quote that does not say how much of the monthly fee reaches the ad platform is not a budget you can judge. If you are comparing agencies in the US, our comparison of US med spa marketing agencies notes which ones publish their prices.
What to expect from the first ninety days
A budget conversation that ignores timing sets everyone up to be disappointed, so here is the honest shape of it.
Paid ads can produce booked consults inside the first two to three weeks, provided the offer is ready. They also stop the moment you stop paying, which is exactly why they are second in the order and not first.
Search and content take longer. New pages on an established site typically need weeks before Google trusts them enough to rank on competitive terms, and on a newer or neglected site it takes longer still. Anyone promising you first-page rankings in thirty days is either targeting terms nobody searches or is not being straight with you.
Referrals and reviews are the cheapest source of new clients you have and the one most clinics leave entirely to chance. Making them deliberate costs nothing but a system.
Signs you are spending in the wrong order
- You can name your monthly spend but not your cost per booked consult.
- Traffic is up and bookings are flat. That is an offer or consult problem, and more traffic will not fix it.
- You are paying for content and social while your busiest months still arrive by luck.
- Your agency reports impressions, reach and engagement, and cannot tell you how many people booked.
- You have never been shown a number that connects spend to revenue.
If two or more of those are true, the problem is not the size of the budget.
Marketing a med spa on a small budget
If the sum above comes out higher than you can spend right now, start with the work that costs time rather than money. These are the moves that fill a calendar with almost no ad spend:
- Rebook before they leave. The cheapest client is the one already in your chair. Our guide to client retention covers the habits that make it automatic.
- Ask every happy client for a review, the same way every time, and reply to each one.
- Keep your Google Business Profile current with photos, services and your current offer. For a local clinic it is often the first thing a new client sees.
- Send a win-back message to clients you have not seen in six months, with a reason to come back this month.
- Run a two-sided referral credit, so the client who refers and the friend who books both get something.
Our list of med spa marketing ideas has more of these, including quick ones for a slow week. Add paid ads once the offer and the follow-up are ready to turn clicks into consults.
If you are deciding where the money should go before you decide how much, our overview of which channels actually pay for a med spa covers the trade-offs.
Doing it yourself versus handing it over
Both work. They fail for different reasons.
Running it yourself is cheaper in cash and expensive in attention, and attention is the scarcer resource when you are also the person injecting. It works when you genuinely want to own the machine and have time to learn it. That is what our injector business coaching is for: we build the systems with you and teach you to run them, rather than keeping the keys.
Handing it over costs more per month and buys back your calendar. It works when the practice is past the point where the owner can be the marketing department too. That is the med spa marketing side of what we do for clinics in Toronto and across Ontario, and across the rest of Canada.
What does not work is paying for the second while expecting the involvement of the first, or paying for neither and hoping referrals hold.
Common questions
Is there a minimum worth starting with? Below a certain point, paid ads cannot gather enough data to optimise and you are buying noise. Rather than name a figure that will be wrong for your market, we work it back from what a client is worth to you and how many you need. That calculation takes one conversation.
Should the budget change month to month? Yes, and it should follow your calendar rather than the calendar year. Spending the same amount in your busiest month and your quietest is a good way to overpay in one and underinvest in the other.
What about seasonality? Aesthetics has real seasonal swings, and they differ by service mix and by market. The point of building a system is that the quiet stretches stop being a surprise you react to.
What percentage of revenue should a med spa spend on marketing? The usual range is 5% to 15% of revenue. The low end suits a clinic whose calendar is mostly full and whose revenue comes from repeat clients. The top end suits a clinic deliberately adding new clients or launching a treatment. A better way to set it is to work back from the new clients you need, your close rate and your cost per booked consult.
How much should a med spa spend on ads each month? Work it out from the clients you need: new clients wanted, divided by your close rate, times your cost per booked consult, which usually lands between $80 and $300 for med spas. Below roughly $1,500 a month, Meta rarely has enough data to optimise, so a smaller budget is better spent on reviews, rebooking and referrals first.
How do you market a med spa on a small budget? Start with what costs time rather than money: rebook clients before they leave, ask every happy client for a review, keep your Google Business Profile current, send a win-back message to clients you have not seen in six months, and run a referral credit that rewards both sides. Add paid ads once the offer and follow-up are ready.
If you want the number worked out properly for your practice, that is the conversation we have first with every clinic. It starts with what a client is worth to you and what your calendar actually needs, not with a percentage from an article.
Start here: med spa marketing in Toronto, across Canada, or nurse injector marketing. When you are ready, join the waitlist.
About the author
Vanessa Kay is the founder of The Kay Media, a marketing agency working only with med spas, aesthetic clinics and nurse injectors. She spent seven years running digital marketing for Fortune 500 brands before founding the agency, and has since scaled more than 25 injector-led practices across Toronto, the GTA and the rest of Canada. The best month a client has recorded with the agency is over $200,000.
Every figure and sequence in this article comes from budgets run for real injector-led practices. Where the right answer depends on a clinic’s own numbers, this article says so rather than substituting an industry average.
Published 29 July 2026. Updated 13 October 2026.